rel=”no follow”
As cool as rel=”nofollow” is, I think Steven Garrity is right: this diminishes the benefits that you do get from on-topic URLs in reader comments.
I’ve had my readers give me very good links in the past with their comments. This feels like tossing the baby out with the bathwater.
[And yes, Jeff, we did talk about this at lunch, and I was all enthusiastic then, but this was a concern then, too.]
Now, someone will object, “But hey, if you’re posting an entry where you ask a question and someone provides the answer in a comment, you’re going to update your entry, right? I mean, if it’s in the entry, well, the rel=”nofollow” won’t be applicable then, eh?” Yeah, I am. But that’s more work for me. The way it works now is less work.
Do we really want to let the spammers make us throw out the entire passel of kitty litter, rather than just taking their turds out?
How about a compromise? Links in the actual comment body don’t get the nofollow, but links surrounding the name (like how canspice.org is going to get linked to below this comment where my name is) do get it? The vast majority of spam that I’ve seen (and I haven’t seen much, granted) only has links in the signature portion and not the actual comment text.
January 19th, 2005 at 3:09 pmThere’s a bunch of ways to do this. I was sitting here, thinking, “Why are we using no-follow for non-owner-generated links? Why do we not tage owner-generated links and give them more weight than the links of the commentors?”
Of course, if people know the rel value, they’ll just spam that, causing you to write some regex to strip that out of your content. I guess it’s easier and faster to parse user-inputted links, add the rel to them, and go on with life.
And you’re right about the spam you’re seeing, Brad, but it’s not all that way: some is chock full of links, and some is random pseudo-philosophical bullshit with a spammer’s desired keyword as the author name and the URL they want to spam as the author URL.
This is a hack. What amuses me is that this little teeny hack took sooooooooo long to get out there. MT has been seeing comment spam in many forms for well over a year.
January 19th, 2005 at 3:25 pmI think Steve has a good solution.
January 19th, 2005 at 6:17 pmOooooh! I agree. That kicks lots of ass. It’s not for everyone, certainly, but hey …
January 19th, 2005 at 6:20 pm